How Master Data Management Is Driving a Data Transformation in Enterprises

From new technologies hitting the market to the invariably changing customer demands and skilled staff shortage to economic volatility, IT leaders are contending with many challenges amid the post-pandemic disruptions and geopolitical instability.

As it stands, most businesses run disparate applications along with legacy resource planning and content management systems, where the data can be easily fragmented and duplicated. This paves the way for overall poor data quality, preventing an accurate picture of business performance.

Poor data quality directly impacts a business’s bottom line. For frontline employees, it can lead to a lot of time wasted in tracking and resolving errors. For businesses, poor data quality leads to a loss of revenue. For instance, they might push their marketing efforts to the wrong target audience or incur high costs due to shipment delays or altogether wrong shipments.

Even getting answers to the most basic questions such as “what are the products with the best profit margins?” or “Who are the customers with the desired purchasing power?” becomes challenging.

Therefore, a truly digital enterprise should be capable of maintaining structured and tightly governed data that can be widely shared across multiple applications, processes, and systems. This is where Master Data Management (MDM) comes into the picture.

Master Data Management – The Key to Unlocking the True Value of Data

Master Data Management (MDM) is a set of technologies and processes to manage the master data of an organization while ensuring its accuracy, uniformity, accountability, and consistency. It derives value and insights from the business data scattered around various applications, spreadsheets, and even physical media.

In a nutshell, MDM provides an integrated view of critical business entities like customers, products, suppliers, accounts, materials, and more.

Benefits of MDM

Informed decision-making based on reliable and accurate data
Accurate internal and external reporting
Reduced compliance and security risks
Better agility to adapt to dynamic business requirements
360-degree view of end-user experience to serve them better
Reduced redundant and unnecessary workload
Break down of data silos
Acceleration of digital innovation
Single source of truth for employees
Adoption of a data-as-a-service model

How Master Data Management Drives Data Transformation?

MDM fixes poor data quality issues and eliminates the organizational pains of reporting, regulatory compliance, and successful data transformation. As the data sources are added to the system, MDM initiates the processes to identify, collect, transform, and repair the data.

As soon as data meets the quality threshold, data taxonomies are created to maintain the master reference in high quality. When organizations leverage MDM, they can enjoy peace of mind in the context of accurate, up-to-date, and consistent data.

Characteristics of an MDM Solution

An open, flexible, and extensible data model to capture the master data and related attributes.
The capability of metadata management for items such as matrixed hierarchies and relationships.
Source system management capability for cross-referencing business objects and satisfying the conflicting data ownership requirements.
An integrated data quality interface to prevent errors when the data is entered outside the MDM application.
Data quality function to identify and eliminate duplicate data while ensuring proper data accuracy.
Continued data cleansing function to keep the data up to date.
Comprehensive data security system to monitor and control the data access, maintain change history, and update rights.
Internal triggering mechanism to deploy the change information to connected systems.
Data migration capability to ensure consistency as data moves across the organization.
Highly scalable platform to ensure critical data access under heavy workloads.

Steps To Build a Successful Master Data Management Strategy

Step 1 – Profiling of Master Data

It is vital to check the existing organizational data to prevent potential delays before implementing the MDM strategy. The profiling helps to prepare the guidelines required for data rectification. The master data profile becomes the base of data standardization and transformation.

Step 2 – Consolidation of Master Data

The plethora of data from disparate systems is consolidated while removing duplicate and unnecessary content. It also helps to maintain the traceability of the enterprise data.

Step 3 – Master Data Governance and Cleansing

Data cleansing in the MDM context means matching, standardizing, and correcting data. Data governance holds people and processes as top priorities while ensuring data’s usability, integrity, and availability.

Maximize the Benefits of MDM With Trinus

The benefits of master data management touch every space of your business but only if you leverage the right MDM platform. At Trinus, we believe in the power of data and help you manage, access, and analyze data in the best possible manner.

Our efforts to boost the digital transformation of your business enable purpose-built process controls on master data, elimination of inconsistencies in the business data across applications, mitigation of risks, and strong governance.